Justin S. Harrison

If Fury Road is a bullet train, Furiosa is a roller coaster. The climb is just as important to the thrills as the drop. One of its core pleasures is learning how the world shaped Furiosa into the warrior who will ultimately fight the whole world to win a better tomorrow for the Five Wives. To make that click, Furiosa ensures that its audience understands the world.

The fourth installment of Hideaki Anno’s “Shin” project is brainy, moving, and marvelously idiosyncratic. It’s my favorite film of 2023...

Yasuhiro Nightow’s 1995 to 2007 science fiction manga Trigun/Trigun Maximum is a bombastic comic. How bombastic? Its official subtitle is “DEEP SPACE FUTURE PLANET GUN ACTION!!” – double exclamation points and all. Illustrator and writer Nightow does everything he can to live up to that name.

Meredith Gran rules. Octopus Pie, her 2007-2017 webcomic, is for my money one of the medium’s all-time great works. Her major post-Octopus Pie creative project—the crowd-funded point and click adventure game Perfect Tides, launched on Tuesday. It’s terrific — a witty and thoughtful coming of age story that navigates the goofy and the heavy with care and skill amidst gorgeous artwork, compulsively readable prose, and clever puzzles. AIPT was able to speak with Gran in the run-up to Perfect Tides‘

“Perceptions” is a fascinating, if not wholly successful, comic. After kicking off Spider-Man with “Torment”, a story that played to his strengths as an artist and writer (visual emphasis on Spider-Man in motion, horror beats built on the grotesque and the mystical) McFarlane takes a genuine swing and tries to stretch himself. “Perceptions” is a mystery that questions society’s systems of power, a horror story where the supernatural is less terrifying than the domestic/familiar, and to some extent a deconstructive presentation of Spider-Man.

Most intriguing of all, “Perceptions” is, deliberately or otherwise, deeply influenced by and riffing on David Lynch, Mark Frost, and company’s once-beloved-then-discounted-now-again-beloved and highly influential supernatural mystery/horror/slice of life television series Twin Peaks.

One of the things that has long fascinated me about the way comics work is the extent to which the art of it is about controlling perception. Within a panel, the reader sees a specific image. On its own, the image is an image. In concert with other panels, it becomes sequential art – the comic’s creator(s) directing the reader’s eye and mind from image to image. But it’s not just motion and the passage of time that a comics page creates; it’s the perception of them.

An engine revs. Someone or something breathes heavily. An unseen narrator begins to speak. “My name is Max. My world is fire, and blood.” He sounds deeply weary, broken even. Beneath his soliloquy, a radio crackles to life. There are screams and gunshots. A second man’s voice, this one anonymous and enraged, yells “Why are you hurting these people?!” The opening credits roll. Max’s (Tom Hardy) haunted narration and a patchwork quilt of other voices lay out the fall of the world and the birth of the Wasteland. So begins Mad Max: Fury Road.

Fury Road turns five years old this week, and in a lot of ways it feels like western blockbuster cinema is still working to catch up to the work director/co-writer George Miller and his creative collaborators did with it. It is a gloriously rich text on every level. The care and craft put into its automotive armada – each member of which tells its own story, from the last of the V8 Interceptors to the heroic, hard-traveling War Rig to the nefarious Gigahorse.